The Center will tackle key questions surrounding increasing population and family diversity, which goes in tandem with growing inequality in life expectancy, physical and mental health, educational and employment opportunities, as well as income and wealth. Expanding family diversity is likely to shape both the present and the future of societies but, at the same time, remains poorly understood. This diversity will present opportunities for societal progress but simultaneously poses the risk of growing inequalities, ranging from life expectancy and physical and mental health to income and wealth. 

The ECPD aims to leverage this research gap to investigate pathways and mechanisms under which family diversity is related to inequalities and opportunities in health, education and socioeconomic outcomes in aging societies. The family is a crucial, if not the primary, arena wherein inequalities are (re-)produced within and across generations in and through continuous interaction with social policy, the labour market and educational institutions.

By linking biomedical sciences and social sciences and engaging in collaborative research on various areas such as family diversity, health or education, the ECPD seeks to move beyond a mono-disciplinary approach to examining health and illness. The consortium represents a group of Berlin-based researchers with a strong involvement in the international research community. 

Anette Fasang, Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)” and Professor of Microsociology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, will be heading one of the research objectives of the ECPD. Together with Paul Gellert, Professor of Social and Behavioral Gerontology at the Institute of Medical Sociology and Rehabilitation Science at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and Michaela Kreyenfeld, Professor of Sociology at Hertie School Berlin and affiliated with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Anette Fasang, will act as a PI for the project To rethink family caregiving in aging societies. 

The project aims to understand the dynamics of complex relationships between family members who provide and receive informal care. The project seeks to emphasize the compensatory effects of the family system, including a broad spectrum of non-traditional families such as post-separation families, families of choice, LGBTQ+-families and many more. With changing family structures, there is also an increasing need for the provision of care from a distance and employing digital technologies that could facilitate distance caregiving. The project supplements research on the links between family diversity and spatial-geographic, socioeconomic and health disparities in the context of caregiving in aging societies, hereby filling gaps in the existing literature. By using innovative methods for data analysis, the project aims to make unique contributions to the field.